This story is tragically familiar. In the past few years, many of the men who have committed horrific, unthinkable acts of violence against the public have had a history of abusing the women in their lives. Prior to unleashing their deranged violence onto the world, it appears they practiced it against the most vulnerable and accessible targets ― those living inside their homes.

Before Micah Johnson gunned down five Dallas police officers, in the deadliest attack against law enforcement officers in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, he was accused of sexually harassing a female soldier, who asked that Johnson receive mental help and for a protective order against him.

Before Omar Mateen opened fire in a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and committed the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, he beat his wife.

Before Robert Dear shot to death three strangers in a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last fall, he allegedly abused his wives, was charged with rape and arrested under a “Peeping Tom” law.

Before Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted bombs at the Boston Marathon with his brother in 2013, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others, he was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend.

Before Cedric Ford stormed through multiple Kansas townships with an assault weapon and a pistol, killing three and injuring 14, he’d just been served with a restraining order stemming from a domestic violence complaint filed by his ex-girlfriend. In her request for the order, his ex-girlfriend wrote that it was her belief that he was “in desperate need of medical and psychological help.”

A new journal, Feminist Dissent, aims to create a space to interrogate the multi-faceted links between historical and resurgent religious fundamentalism and gender.

Seasons of Mud by Yousif Naser. Photo: Yousif Naser

In the last two decades there has been an exponential growth not only in fundamentalist movements around the world, but also in systematic research and debate about the scope, strategies and impacts of fundamentalist mobilisations. The power of faith-based organisations, among which fundamentalist tendencies have found fertile ground, has also been enhanced through their ability to work on multiple levels - through international, nation state, and oppositional or civil society spaces - to their own advantage.

The new journal, Feminist Dissent, which is hosted by the University of Warwick, brings together innovative and critical insights to enhance our understanding of the relationship between gender, fundamentalism and related socio-political issues. At a time of rising religious fundamentalism which is accompanied by intensifying threats to civil liberties, freedom of expression, dissent, and difference, we aim to create what we believe we need most – a space where contributors can say the things that we have not been able to say. We hope this will narrow the distance between dominant feminist thinking and lived experience, and give rise to new coalitions of feminists committed not just to writing about justice, but to fighting for it.

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.

Full Range of SRH Services Must Be Available to Those Experiencing IPV, Family Planning Providers in Particular Have a Crucial Role to Play

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is widespread in the United States and constitutes a serious public health crisis, often significantly impacting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). A new analysis in the Guttmacher Policy Review arguesthat addressing the needs of those experiencing IPV requires an integrated approach that includes the full range of sexual and reproductive health services. The analysis also examines key federal policies at the intersection of IPV and SRHR, and finds that safety-net family planning providers are particularly well-positioned to connect women experiencing IPV to the care and resources they need.

The global anti-trafficking movement, now well into its second decade, has successfully used the 3P paradigm of prosecution, protection, and prevention to strengthen how the world combats trafficking in persons. Governments committed to enhancing prosecution of traffickers have enacted laws that criminalize all forms of human trafficking and prescribe suff iciently stringent sentences. Protection efforts have empowered individuals to move beyond their victimization and rebuild their lives with dignity, security, and respect. Prevention measures have provided communities around the world with valuable information about the risks of human trafficking, elevating public consciousness about this crime. Yet so much work remains……..

"If there is a single theme to this year’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, it is the conviction that there is nothing inevitable about trafficking in human beings. That conviction is where the process of change really begins—with the realization that just because a certain abuse has taken place in the past doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate that abuse in the future or that we can afford to avert our eyes. Instead, we should be asking ourselves—what if that victim of trafficking was my daughter, son, sister, or brother?

"This year’s TIP Report asks such questions, because ending modern slavery isn’t just a fight we should attempt—it is a fight we can and must win.

"The TIP Report is the product of a yearlong effort requiring contributions and follow-up from employees in the United States and at our diplomatic outposts across the globe, host country governments, and civil society." – John F. Kerry, Secretary of State

The Report

The 2016 Trafficking in Persons Report is available in PDF and HTML formats. The PDF is available as a complete one-piece file and as individual sections for easier download. To view the PDF files, you will need to download, at no cost, the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Torture is widespread in Mexico’s “war on drugs”, but the impact on women has been largely ignored or downplayed. This report analyses the stories of 100 women who have reported torture and other forms of violence during arrest and interrogation by police and armed forces. Severe beatings; threats of rape against women and their families; near-asphyxiation, electric shocks to the genitals; groping of breasts and pinching of nipples; rape with objects, fingers, firearms and the penis – these are just some of the forms of violence inflicted on women, in many cases with the intention of getting them to “confess” to serious crimes.

The data visualization project, released by the Black Lives Matter initiative Campaign Zero, reveals several stipulations written into contracts or state law that activists claim hinder investigations into police misconduct.

WASHINGTON — A majority of U.S. cities with police union contracts and nearly every state with a version of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights have at least one major barrier to holding police accountable for misconduct, a new report claims.

The data visualization project, released by the Black Lives Matter initiative Campaign Zero, looks at jurisdictions that dismiss police complaints, restrict or delay the interrogation of an officer, give officers compromising access to information, limit oversight or discipline, and either pay for, or erase records of, police misconduct.

Campaign Zero is made up of activists Samuel Sinyangwe, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson. The review, which includes a state-by-state breakdown of each state’s restrictive measures, is part of a broader movement to increase transparency in police departments around the country in an effort to reduce police violence.

“In terms of results, I hope this information empowers communities to effectively push city leaders to remove these types of barriers to accountability in their contracts, as we are seeing happen with newfound pressure to renegotiate contract provisions in Chicago and Seattle, for example,” Campaign Zero’s Samuel Singyangwe said in an email statement to BuzzFeed News.

The report reveals several stipulations written into contracts or state law that Campaign Zero claims hinder investigations into police misconduct. In Florida, for instance, there is a180-day statute of limitations on investigations or “disciplinary action, suspension, demotion, or dismissal may not be undertaken by an agency against a law enforcement officer or correctional officer for any act, omission, or other allegation of misconduct” according to the state’s policy language.

“They were all telling me to go away.” Anano, 6, is a child actor. But the situation she’s in is very real. Every day, millions of children living in poverty are ignored, pushed aside and deprived of everything they need to thrive.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Our 2016 State of the World’s Children Report is a call to action for the world to treat its least fortunate children the way it treats its luckier children: http://uni.cf/sowc16#foreverychild#FightUnfair

The official UNICEF YouTube channel is your primary destination for the latest news updates from the frontline, documentaries, celebrity appeals, and more about our work to realize the rights of every child.

While Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Justice Stephen Breyer in his majority opinion, she penned her own scathing concurring opinion that, in one brief paragraph, warns lawmakers across the country that medically unnecessary abortion restrictions will never be tolerated by the high court.

The 2013 Texas law that the court struck down would have required all abortions to take place in ambulatory surgical centers, or mini-hospitals, instead of regular clinics. Ginsburg kept her argument simple: Abortions are statistically safer than many simpler medical procedures, including tonsillectomies, colonoscopies, in-office dental surgery and childbirth — but Texas does not subject those procedures to the same onerous requirements.

“Given those realities, it is beyond rational belief that H.B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law ‘would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions,’ Ginsburg wrote. “When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners ... at great risk to their health and safety.”

Abortions — legal or otherwise — may be increasing in Latin American countries where the Zika virus is spreading, new research suggests.

The data, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, provide an early glimpse of a hard-to-track phenomenon that may be altering the way this unprecedented Zika outbreak is recorded in the annals of medical history.

Requests for abortion-inducing drugs shot up in some Zika-affected countries after the alarm was raised about Zika infection in pregnancy, according to researchers who analyzed traffic to the website of an international nonprofit organization that provides the drugs early in pregnancy. The requests rose by between 36 and 108 percent. Abortion restrictions are widespread across Central and South America.

This study determined the prevalence and nature of police crime in the United States based on arrest statistics; identified factors that influenced how an agency responded to arrests of its officers; and examined whether officer arrests correlated with other forms of police misconduct.

Abstract:

Google News searches identified 6,724 cases nationwide during 2005 through 2011. The arrests involved 5,545 individual sworn officers employed by 2,529 non-Federal State and local law enforcement agencies in 1,205 counties and independent cities in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. The rate of officers arrested was 0.72 officers arrested per 1,000 officers or a rate of 1.7 officers per 100,000 population nationwide. Data and discussion are provided for the following types of crime for which police were arrested: sex-related crimes, alcohol-related crimes, drug-related crimes, violence-related crimes, and profit-motivated crimes. The cases identified in this research stemmed largely from opportunities inherent in the context of police work, although 60 percent of all of the cases identified in this study occurred when the officer was technically off-duty. The organizational response to police crimes varied widely across all of these crime types. An arrest in itself mattered much less than the type of underlying criminal behavior that prompted the arrest. Sworn officers were known to have lost their jobs in only 38 percent of the alcohol-related cases, but lost their jobs in 72 percent of the sex-related arrests and 70 percent of the drug-related cases. The odds that an officer will lose his/her job increased significantly if they were criminally convicted on at least one charged offense. This study recommends that State and local law enforcement agencies conduct routine annual criminal background checks of every sworn officer and install comprehensive personnel assessment systems that collect a wide range of data. 84 tables, 28 figures, and approximately 150 references

The shakeup comes amid a growing sex scandal. At the center of it is 18-year-old Celeste Guap, a prostitute who said she has had sex with as many as 28 police officers stretching across several counties and agencies, sometimes when she was a minor, sometimes for money and sometimes in exchange for information that would keep her from being arrested.

When she came out to her mother at age 14, Laura Esquivel said her mother was upset for many reasons, but mostly because she was afraid for her.

"She was afraid I wouldn't be happy. Afraid I would get hurt. Afraid how people who would treat me, about the possibility of being physically hurt," said Esquivel, Hispanic Federation national policy director.

Esquivel, who founded one of the first national Latino LGBTQ groups - LLEGO - is mourning the deaths of the victims in the Orlando, Fla. shooting. None of those named as of Monday afternoon were people she knew, but as a Latina and lesbian, talking of the tragedy with an NBC News Latino brought her to tears.

This study provides the first nationally representative data on service contact, police or advocate best practices, and help-seeking obstacles for family violence that involved exposure to children.

Abstract:

Ten best practices were offered in 13–58 percent of police contacts and 34–97 percent of advocate contacts. Most police best practices were associated with increased likelihood of arrest. Referrals and information about restraining orders and shelter were associated with victim-perpetrator separation. There was marked case attrition for all criminal justice services, including reporting to police, in-person police responding, arrest, convictions, and incarceration.

Only 10 cases resulted in jail time. Counter to the hypothesis, higher rates of some police best practices were associated with lower likelihood of advocate contact. Also unexpectedly, higher rates of some obstacles, such as lack of transportation, were associated with higher use of police services. The study recommends referral to specific resources as a focus of crisis intervention efforts. Some family’s needs may be served by a single provider if best practices are used. Some obstacles may influence which services are sought rather than depress helpseeking altogether. These nationally representative data can be used as benchmarks for program evaluations and needs assessments. A nationally representative sample of 517 family-violence incidents was drawn from the 4,503 respondents to the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence II. .(Publisher abstract modified)

A 20-year-old woman missing since late April was found dead on May 16, 2016. The suspect is a former Marine who is a civilian employee of the US military at Kadena Airbase. Local police report that he confessed to the woman's rape and murder, and told them the location of her corpse. This crime comes barely six weeks after a US sailor assigned to Camp Schwab was arrested for the rape of a Japanese woman in a Naha hotel. Following that crime, Lt. General Lawrence Nicholson, III Marine Expeditionary Force commander, visited Prefectural Governor Onaga Takeshi to "express my deepest regret and remorse at the incident."

What General Nicholson called "the incident" is one of more than 500 crimes designated as heinous under Japanese law, including approximately 120 rapes, committed by US forces in Okinawa since it reverted from US military occupation to Japanese administration in 1972. As Takazato Suzuyo points out in her interview below, the 120 reported rapes are only "the tip of an iceberg" since most rapes in Okinawa and elsewhere go unreported.

The April rape and murder was committed on the eve of President Obama's highly publicized trip to Japan for the G-7 Summit and a visit to Hiroshima for a speech advocating nuclear weapons reductions. Shortly after Obama's arrival, he held a meeting with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to discuss the rape and murder in Okinawa. During their stern-faced appearance before the cameras that followed, Abe told reporters "this is an unforgivable crime, and I have expressed our anger." Obama expressed his "deepest regrets."

Yet official efforts were already underway to downplay and trivialize this latest atrocity as "the Okinawa issue" (沖縄問題), and not the responsibility of the Japanese and US governments for imposing 73% of the American military presence in all of Japan on this small island prefecture.